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Well, yeah, see the problem with that is it was originally meant for play balance. The races all get special bonuses and abilities, the Humans get more versatility of class. And as for the wizards, they get so incredibly powerful in the higher levels, they pay for it in vulnerability in the lower levels.
And with the later rulebooks (the Complete Book Of...) they have all the kits and extra rules that allow you to do things like non-fatal combat, there's an elven-bard rogue kit... but that's what you get with a game that evolves from a basic premise. It's windy and complicated. Makes perfect sense if you followed it from the start and incorporate the new rules as you go. Like I can, being old and all.

Yes, making me feel guilty for the Granpa teasing works just as well i guess...

As for the Complete books, they were the only complain of our group's 2nd edition fans, as they felt that you had to buy more and more to get the full picture of a class. Not that the 3rd edition is free of that kind of thing of course! Thank the gods for Birthdays!

Heh.. well, they didn't read the part in the beginning where it says they're optional, supplimental rules. Which means the game is totally playable without them.

Game is never complete if you don't own ALL the extra shiny stuff that you can get. NEVER! Until you get the last book / expansion / whatever, you'll be playing a crippled wannabe of a game. Too bad the expansions / new books usually take a huge steaming dump on the game balance (at least eventually).

To quote a wise man...

IT MUST BE MINE!

Yes, if the supplement is out you will always feel you are missing out...
Still while it is bad for your pocket and does create imbalance at some point, it also helps spice things up for those who have been playing for a long time and need to see something new and different pop out.

How do you people feel about pre-written adventures?

They can be great as sources for ideas, locations, NPCs, monsters... the trouble really comes when a GM relies on them exclusively and isn't able to compensate when players (as they always will) go off in a different direction than the module authors predicted. That's when you get railroading to keep players in the bounds of the text ("no, the road is...washed out! By a flash flood! You have to stay in the tower!").

There's also the lack of prep problem, when a GM decides to wing it and doesn't read the module well beforehand.

"You walk into a 10 x 10 room. There is some nice furniture here, and a suit of armour against the wall. There is a pit trap in the floor, lined with spikes, covered with an area rug to make it undetectab... oops. OK, guys - pretend you didn't hear that last part."

So as a starting point, well-written ones can be awesome. As a GMing crutch, not so great.

As far as I'm concerned, the GM can never truly think of all the possible actions the players can think of (neither should he/she try, that'd make one insane), so she/he will end up winging it for some parts. Ok, if the GM knows the players really (REALLY!) well, it is possible, or if the players have set into their way of playing (monkey see, monkey smash etc...).

Backtracking a bit I want to talk about D&D versions again. Playing and Dming 3.5ed I have come across a silly problem. The game is intended to be balanced in terms of treasure-experience ratio but this makes the bloody thing stupidly unrealistic.

I'm a great believer in trying to instill a sense of reality and beliveability, this means that our group have been looting weapons and equipment off encounters for ages, and looking for expensive items in the wild in between locations. With 3.5 this is impossible. After killing a vengeful knight who is meant to be worth say 300gp in treasure the group are expected to ignore the fact he is wearing full plate and carrying maybe another 600gp worth of weapons. Surely even orc swords are worth their weight in iron to the right kind of smith.

When I first looked at 3.5 I was firmly impressed by the encounter level and challenge rating system as a means of promoting fair play but it has overall reduced the level of fun we have been having with our games as every encounter seems to end with the words, "The creature's weapon is damaged beyond all repair and is now worthless."

Also, what is the deal with the D&d belief that gold is more worthless than steel, even in late medieval societies. 1000 pieces of gold! What are they, about an eighth of an ounce each I think. I could buy a car with that! Gold seems to be so plentiful in D&d that I would imagine it's used to make fishing weights.

Magic swords in fantasy literature tend to be pretty hot stuff and as such probably wouldn't be for sale, but can you seriously tell me that a plus 2 weapon is more effective in comparison to an AK47 today. They cost about £35, less than I spend a week on cable. Even though I know we're in a world where weapons are at an all time low, magical weapons of no great shakes seem to be prohibitively expensive.

I think rolemaster got it right when it had characters start with two gold pieces and they would consider themselves rich. My D&d characters regularly walk into an inn and chuck a few gp behind the bar because they can't be bothered to record change.

Have you thought about tweaking the game a bit? It could be basically as easy as making gold silver and so on... So basically instead of copper, silver and gold they would have wooden pennies, copper and silver.
I can't even remember when I played a character who'd think its just ok to take a dead guys armor. I mean, even selling it is a bit creepy. Yeah, snatch a sword if it looks really expensive (or a purse if I play a poor SOB), but anything else? No thanks!

Historically this sort of thing happened quite a bit. Theives would rush into battlefields and strip the dead and near-dead for fun and profit.

Hm, I think that the greatest problem is not the value of the items you gain from certain monsters or defeated villiains. But how you carry it...

I mean, the heroes slay a dragon and have so a claim on his (surely) gigantigal hoard of a bazillion gold pieces. But how they should carry it away? Gold is heavy, and so are armors, weapons, statues and other goodies. Even a bag of Holding is not endless.

And then some PC is taking every orcsword, his packpack soon gets really full and heavy...

Okay, some prices in D&D are a bit off... so go one and modify it

Well while i agree with Calabite that keeping it realistic is important, taking economics too far also has its dangers. I know a group that spent an entire session calculating the value of swords they found when they ambushed an evil merchant and then decided to sell his merchandise for profit and i also lived through a Dark Sun campaign where weight calculations were important so you knew how much water you could carry - and it took us a good 45 minutes each session. In the end we could not even carry our money.

So on the one hand realism is important and on the other time is precious, so i try to balance with two rules: fist, if they become rich enough to buy a plus 5 sword early, good for them: the next villain will have a natural armor bonus that will make the battle fair, or will carry an evil shield (so they cannot use it) or will have a spell cast on him/her to make their AC higher. They cannot loot every bonus off the fallen enemy. After all, this IS the third edition! After that, there will be some encounters without treasure, for example a fight with a wild monster or some spirits. Just because the book says that a 6th level encounter has to have THAT amount of treasure, does not mean that a pack of Dire Wolves will have somewhere on them a cache of magical weapons! If the players HAVE to have some treasure, it could a key they need, a guarded map or a piece of knowledge they were looking for.

For example one of the treasures my party found at some point was three bags of holding, as they had stumbled upon the bodies of some tomb looters. So this is how you get out of the weight calculation problems as well!

THREE bags of holding? You are spoling them!